I just wanted to suggest something that i thought would be very useful for RobotC. I've heard of several people who use professional IDE's such as Eclipse and Visual Studio to edit the included files while having the main file running in RobotC itself. it would be a very nice edition to RobotC if there was plugins for these IDE's. i have both Eclipse and Visual Studio. they are both very good for larger files. RobotC's interface is very nice if you just have one file. but once you get into serious programming with it and spread it out among multiple files it gets a bit confusing. it would therefore be very convenient to have the ability to use Eclipse for the entire project and be able to compile and download the code from eclipse. i'm not sure if this is possible to do but it would definitely be usefull.

Hallelujah!!!! . Finally, someone who has the same idea as me. I use Visual Studio and love it; an add in for Visual Studio would make things so much easier because you get the advantage of having all the powerful IDE features right there, and it's perfectly stable, unlike RobotC. Of course to actually write an add-on, they would essentially have to create one which deploys a whole new language due to the fact that RobotC is NOT C (even though it should be closer *grumble grumble* ). There may also be licensing issues with Microsoft because the add-on would be released to the general public rather than being for personal use. I would love to see an add-on version of RobotC, I think it would be great for FIRST teams, especially FTC teams which are generally younger and would have a hard time learning a text based programming language; I was head programmer on team 2890, had done a little C++ and some .NET stuff, and had a hell of time trying to use RobotC, and wished all along that FIRST had gotten Microsoft to construct an add-on rather than give us this undocumented, unstable rollercoaster. Unfortunately, I just don't see this happening any time soon , at least not until they iron out some (*erm* all) of the bugs.

_________________Captain, Head programmer, School of the Arts, Silverbots Robtics Team #2890

Visual Studio is a very nice development environment. Unfortunately, it is also a LOT more expensive than most people can afford. There is an "express" version but it does not allow addons or plugins. This makes rewriting RC as a plugin for VS completely moot. No one will pay 100's of dollars only to be able to use RC.

I think there'd a be lot more bugs fixed if people would participate a little more in testing the alphas. I get the feeling I am the only one who even went near them to try and give them a run. People piss and moan about how crap it all is but when offered a chance to partake in the improvement process, the only thing we hear are crickets.

The alphas produce perfectly usable programs. Yes there are still lots of bugs and the more people use it, the more will be spotted. I know from first hand that Tim and Dick are working very hard on fixing the bugs that have been mentioned in the alpha thread and many, many others. However, the slower the new bugs are found, the longer it's going to take before a new release will be brought out. So quit your moaning and start testing. The bugs aren't going to find themselves. Use the alpha thread and log the bugs there. The more testing and bug tracking we do as a community, the more time the developers have to fix them.

There is a new FIRST season coming soon, so they're just as keen as you are to get a proper release out ASAP. This is a community, so let's pull together and make it better.

Visual Studio is a very nice development environment. Unfortunately, it is also a LOT more expensive than most people can afford. There is an "express" version but it does not allow add-ons or plugins. This makes rewriting RC as a plugin for VS completely moot. No one will pay 100's of dollars only to be able to use RC.

I'm not saying get rid of a standalone RobotC altogether, nor should we force people to shell out hundreds just so they can use RobotC, but rather offer a VS add-on for those who already have VS, are familiar with it, and would rather develop in VS than learn their way around a new IDE which is far from perfect. I might also mention that there are other IDEs, most notably the Java IDE, NetBeans, which also supports add-ons and is completely free.

mightor wrote:

I think there'd a be lot more bugs fixed if people would participate a little more in testing the alphas. I get the feeling I am the only one who even went near them to try and give them a run. People piss and moan about how crap it all is but when offered a chance to partake in the improvement process, the only thing we hear are crickets.

As for the bug testing, have you ever considered that people don't really know how to properly test a piece of software. Most people who use software don't expect there to be bugs in it, don't know that they have found a bug, believe it to be just another confine of the software. Even if they have found a bug and know it, they have no idea of how to report a bug, let alone test software for the purposes of finding bugs. Additionally people may be afraid that using unstable software will damage their computer and/or what ever project they are working on and thus do not want to test the alphas. On top of all that some people may not be in a position to just test alphas especially if they, like me, do not actually have access to a robot because their exposure is in a team environment; that is, the robot belongs to the team, not to the programmer himself.

If more people knew how to test for bugs than more people might actually do it.

P.S. Sorry about the double post; internet is misbehaving.

_________________Captain, Head programmer, School of the Arts, Silverbots Robtics Team #2890

I'm not saying get rid of a standalone ROBOTC altogether, nor should we force people to shell out hundreds just so they can use ROBOTC, but rather offer a VS add-on for those who already have VS, are familiar with it, and would rather develop in VS than learn their way around a new IDE which is far from perfect. I might also mention that there are other IDEs, most notably the Java IDE, NetBeans, which also supports add-ons and is completely free.

That would require a LOT of programming effort. Surely that would be better spent fixing bugs and improving the current IDE? Having two products also means more bugs to fix and the devs seems to be have a hard enough time maintaining the current one. Increasing the programming and support load will probably not lead to an increase in quality.

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As for the bug testing, have you ever considered that people don't really know how to properly test a piece of software. Most people who use software don't expect there to be bugs in it, don't know that they have found a bug, believe it to be just another confine of the software. Even if they have found a bug and know it, they have no idea of how to report a bug, let alone test software for the purposes of finding bugs.

The build specifically says it's alpha. Alpha implies bugs. As for testing, you don't need a method to do this. Just use it like you would any other version and when you stumble into something you don't expect, report it It really is that simple.

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Additionally people may be afraid that using unstable software will damage their computer and/or what ever project they are working on and thus do not want to test the alphas. On top of all that some people may not be in a position to just test alphas especially if they, like me, do not actually have access to a robot because their exposure is in a team environment; that is, the robot belongs to the team, not to the programmer himself.

If you have a backup of your projects (which is always a good thing to do anyway) then you have very little to worry about. Just work on a copy of your stuff. If you can't test because of your environment or circumstance then that's fine. I can say from first hand experience that the alpha builds are perfectly safe to run on your computer. I have tested them on my main computer under Windows 7 64bit and a couple of VMs running various other Windows variants. I had two program crashes since they released the first alpha build a few weeks ago. No data was lost. A lot of people worry about damaging their computer with pre-release software but have no problems downloading cracked copies of games off the Net. I think running an alpha on your system is probably less dangerous than a 0-day copy of the latest RPG or FPS.

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If more people knew how to test for bugs than more people might actually do it.

There is no magic involved. As I said before, just install it, use it and report anything weird or unexpected.

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P.S. Sorry about the double post; internet is misbehaving.

Don't worry, I fixed it

MarkO wrote:

I personally like Open Source, so Eclipse would be great, but for MicroSoft are you talking about standard Visual Studio, or the Robotics Visual Studio?

Visual Studio, but I am guessing MSRVS is based on the same framework. The problem with the free releases such as Express is that they don't allow addons. I am sure that is no accident If a command line version of RobotC were to ever come out, people could make their own wrappers. However, I sincerely doubt that will happen any time soon. Dick has said before that it would involve quite a lot of effort. I, too, would prefer to be able to use use gvim with a Makefile. However, if you really like Open Source, I can recommend taking a peek at nxtOSEK. It's not as easy to use as RobotC but it does give you access to a very nice compiler and toolchain, namely gcc and all of its cousins. I use nxtOSEK and NXC to compare sensor results with RobotC. Tracking down a problem with RobotC and the way it handled raw analogue data was done by comparing data between the 3 firmwares. When RobotC was the odd one out, I had at least eliminated all other factors. Dick did all the digging in the RobotC firmware source code, since I don't have access to that However, the nxtOSEK and enhanced/normal NXT firmwares are Open Source and quite interesting to dig around in. You mentioned before that you're a very seasoned programmer, so I am pretty sure that programming nxtOSEK will not pose a real challenge for you once you've mastered its API and Makefile templates. It allows very low level access to the hardware.

If you can't participate then my earlier rant wasn't directed at you. If, however, you don't participate but potentially could but would rather stand on the sidelines bitching and moaning, then it was. Like I said before, bugs aren't going to find themselves and the more eyes we have looking at these builds, the better RobotC will get. Every day the devs don't have to spent doing normal usage tests themselves could be spent adding the new features you've been asking for.

This is true, but it wasn't the only thing I was talking about. I specifically mentioned taking the alphas for a spin to find *new* bugs. It is better to find them now when it's still early in the development stage, rather than several months down the road.

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